Yet, a new survey of worldwide business users from Dresner Advisory Servicessuggests that business users are actually winning the war. Most new BI projects appear to be not only small in scope, but also favor new emerging BI vendors that have bet on either open source applications or software-as-a-service.

In both cases, the cost of acquiring these tools is well within the reach of most departments. This doesn’t mean that centralized BI applications are going to fade away. But it does mean that at some point in the near future an accommodation is going to have be made between centralized and departmental BI application deployments that allows both types of BI application environments to leverage their respective strengths.

While most IT and business professionals would agree that accessing and managing unstructured data would provide great benefit to an organization, actually extracting useful insights can be a daunting task. ... More >>